We were combing through some data a few weeks ago and discovered something interesting: Over 1/3 of the Fortune 500 has used PBwiki. This is great news for our Small Business Edition — with so many Fortune 500 users, we’ve already seen small business users feeling more comfortable about security and safety.

So we’re turning to our PBwiki community: How should we spread the word about PBwiki in the Fortune 500 to small businesses?

Leave a comment on this post with a suggestion or example of how you would spread the word to business users. The best suggestion will win one free year of the PBwiki Small Business Edition!

Folks,

This morning at 8:03am PDT, our San Francisco center had a power issue, causing about half of our servers there to go down. Due to the large amount of data we now safeguard, as our servers came back up, some of them took a while to verify the correctness of PBwiki’s data, and one of our database servers was fried. Thankfully, we’re quite rigorous about making sure data is in multiple places, so your data was not at risk.

But PBwiki was slow/unavailable for about an hour. We sincerely apologize; we’re putting in place mechanisms to keep the service from being as affected by a single outage and able to recover more quickly and gracefully. We take great pride in making sure that you have smooth, snappy, secure access to your data at all times.

Sincerely,
David Weekly, CEO

We’re thrilled to welcome Mike Bulajewski to the PBwiki family as a UI engineer:

Mike couldn’t decide if he wanted to create intuitive and beautiful designs, or write web applications that work, so he he came to PBwiki to do both. Mike brings skills in visual design, a love for intuitive interfaces, and the technical skills to bring them to life. He has worked as a freelance graphic designer, a performance engineer for Amdocs and a UI designer for Dun & Bradstreet, and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Cal State Sacramento.

What this really means is that Mike can badmouth engineers with the marketing team, and then turn right around and mock marketing with the engineers. Clever, Mike.

Please welcome him to our team. And stay tuned for some dazzling UI changes.

(To see other job openings at PBwiki, visit our Jobs page.)

Jim Blomo, a friend of mine since junior high (!), joined the PBwiki team last week.

Growing up in the rough neighborhood of IRC’s #crackz, Jim escaped the shadowy life of “reverse engineering” to become classically trained at UC Berkeley’s EECS program. There he participated in all things nerdy: playing the Cal Marching Band, being a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar, and moving through the ranks of Residential Computing. After graduating, he entered the wild world of ops at A9.com, running Amazon.com’s product search.

We’re thrilled to have him help us make PBwiki even better, so please welcome Jim to our team!

(To see other job openings at PBwiki, visit our Jobs page.)

PC World named PBwiki last week as one of their Top 25 web sites to watch, along with our buddies at OpenDNS.

PC World says “The site’s simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki” – woo!

Read the full article at PCworld.com!

2 years!!

Congratulations to the entire team for building the world’s easiest wiki. Now beware…we may be in a little late to work tomorrow.

I just spoke to Nathan, our CTO, about the Schtuff transition. He told me that he’s working with Carl at Schtuff to finalize importing the Schtuff wikis to PBwiki. We expect to give the technical thumbs-up to the Schtuff team within 24 hours. After that, Schtuff will begin contacting its (our?) users to let them know how to migrate their wikis. As far as we understand, the trains are all running on time for the import to happen this week or early next week.

If you have questions, or to stay current on the latest Schtuff-transition news, check out this forum post.

Our very own Nathan!

Nathan is the CTO of Pbwiki.com, a Palo Alto-based startup that is now the world’s largest hoster of wikis.

Nathan will be speaking about “how to keep a popular web service from melting when it becomes popular – Debian, PHP, Apache, Lighttpd, Squid, Memcache, MogileFS and MySQL.”

Nathan was a President Scholar and received a BS in Computer Systems Engineering at Stanford University.

More information from the Stanford Linux Users and Open Source Group.

Over the last three months we’ve been offering our users PBwiki presenter packs. If you’re interested in giving a presentation about PBwiki (or Web 2.0 technologies in general) we’d love to ship you our presenter pack. It’s free!

The presenter pack includes:

Here’s a couple of pictures of the goodies from our presenter packs, courtesy of our PBwiki users.

Check out our PBwiki Presenter Pack page for more information on how to obtain the presenter pack.

…no Salmonella here!

Harkening back to David’s post about being glad we ship bits rather than physical stuff, boy, it’s also nice to know that we don’t ship anything that could harm people, either.

On a lighter note, I just bought a household-sized fridge for our office. The one we have now is a very small dorm-room style one. In fact, it was actually my fridge for the two years when I was in a college dorm. With the recent addition of employee #6, it’s bursting at the seams, though, so we’ve decided we need a bigger space for all that Red Bull, leftover Chinese food, and Little Lucca’s sandwiches.

I’ve decided this must mean we’ve arrived as a corporate entity. We need a real fridge. The entire company can’t legally fit in one regular passenger car anymore. Woot.